Here we are celebrating our nation’s birthday this week and it’s always a patriotic rush to honor the Grand Old Republic.

That being said, I’m not so sure the Civil War is over despite what the history books say.

With all the bullets, lead and verbal, flying around, it seems we are in the midst of a civil war.

Yes, we have freedom. But we also have chaos, oppression and anarchy — all woven strangely and dangerously together to knit the fabric of a tinderbox ready to explode.

I hate to suggest we find ourselves living in a cesspool. But we seem to be listening to the water sloshing through the latrine box of a society, with a broken moral compass, drowning in violence. Drowning in blood.

There have been a plethora of mass shootings and a prairie fire of senseless violence in America in recent years.

We’ve become a land that is a cruel, foreboding place, living on the precipice of catastrophe.

OK, we can’t ban all guns. Granted, many of you believe we would be shooting ourselves in the foot or head to do so. I totally disagree, but that argument is for a different day.

There is a bigger picture here during Fourth of July week. Where do we as a society go from here? Right now, we seem to be pausing and nosing our way through the violence, like a hound uncertain of the scent.

All these hateful crimes leave with me with a thick, revolting sensation in my throat.

With bad people with bad intentions seemingly crawling like termites out of the woodwork, they are feeding more than a few worms of doubt in my mind about the future of our populace.

Is America destined to be a seething, Swiss-cheese society shot through with holes? The land of the lawless?

Will we soon have our nerves pitched tauter than we can ever remember as we lay sweating in our beds, thinking with dread of the morning to come?

Shame on us if Uncle Sam soon wears a death mask that has the sort of fierce, unwavering expression you see on a gargoyle, frozen in malevolence.